PSA: Bitcoin Has Been Hijacked (Response)/Btc vs Blockchain/Ripple annihilated by FB Coin

Welcome, welcome to Welcome to Crypto. I'm your host, Carlos, and today I want to let you know that Bitcoin has been hijacked by the Bitcoin developers. It didn't happen recently and it didn't happen suddenly, but over a period of years, the direction of the Bitcoin project has been completely changed. Now, I've been around Bitcoin for a long time, so I—

Hey, you all, welcome back to the channel, and what I want to do today is, um, a very interesting video, um, I came in contact with And I wanted to respond to some of the things that were said in the video and see what we get, you know, out of this Bitcoin, the public service announcement, Bitcoin has been hijacked. Let's see if this information is something that is valid with what's happening in Bitcoin. And we're going to just go through the video and see what we come up with.

I've actually seen this happen firsthand, but for a lot of you guys who joined more recently, it's very difficult to get the truth of where Bitcoin was going in the distant past. But one great resource for that is the very old Bitcoin forums at bitcointalk.org, because the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, actually posted his thoughts on the development of Bitcoin as he was building it. And one of those threads is particularly interesting. The opening post on the thread says, what would happen if we just spammed the network with of transactions. And I love how he just wrote BC instead of BTC because they weren't even using BTC to represent Bitcoin at that time.

Okay, that's kind of interesting. So what he's, um, what he's doing here is he's going back to some of Satoshi's older writings on community threads. And this was something I didn't know because I wasn't around in 2010, that Bitcoin, instead of using the BTC, it wasn't it wasn't using Bitcoin, the BTC, it was just using BC, uh, kind of like Bitcoin Cash. So that's kind of interesting, uh, and we will leave a full link to the video in the description, uh, so you can watch it without interruption and come to your own conclusion. But we're just going to go through the video and, uh, see what, uh, what he, what he says here.

So I've put a link to this thread below the video because I think it's so good to look through. There's a couple of pages of posts of people's thoughts about spam, and Satoshi posted several times here. One of his posts is particularly interesting. He said it would be nice to keep the block.data files small as long as we can. Those are the blockchain files, basically the size of the blockchain. But then he says the eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets. What? Don't care how big the blockchain gets? That sounds crazy. How would you store an arbitrarily large blockchain on your hard drive? I mean, it does have to be limited size, Somehow, right? Well, that kind of reveals the attitude that Satoshi had about the maximum block size, which has been an issue for years, and it's the cause of the high fees on the Bitcoin network. But another of Satoshi's posts really reveals what he's thinking about this. He's talking about microtransactions, which is sending just a few cents of Bitcoin to another person. And today, that's simply not possible on the Bitcoin blockchain because of the high fees. But here's what Satoshi wrote about it. He said, I forgot to add the good part about micropayments. While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall. If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale— P.S. it did— it may already be the case by that time. Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms. Client-only mode, by the way, was added so everyone doesn't have to have a copy of the entire blockchain. Satoshi continues: Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial. Well, it's been about 10 years since Satoshi wrote that, and although bandwidth and storage aren't entirely trivial yet, we have seen a lot of improvement in that space. But unfortunately, the Bitcoin developers blocked the growth of Bitcoin by allowing the transaction load to hit a hard-coded limit in the protocol. And that's why I think that Bitcoin Cash, which moved—

All right, let me stop here. So many of y'all were able to pick up on that, and it had to do with the issue of Bitcoin and micropayments for the most part, and not being concerned about the increase in the block size. But of course, what's been the big debacle and what created the fork with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin is this very thing they're talking about. Whereas we kind of get a picture into the mind of Satoshi that he was looking for a solution for micropayments, you know, uh, with Bitcoin, which, you know, it makes my mindset go to that he really wanted Bitcoin to be this money, this digital money that had a use in this way, um, you know, that, uh, he wasn't concerned about the, the increase in the blocks, in the size of the blocks. So the Bitcoin Core team, as they limit the size of the blocks, uh, and we you know, got this increase in the fees. This is what spurred along Bitcoin Cash to come into play, and whereas it would be more usable like a money in the micropayments and a variety of things that, you know, from what I'm seeing is quite important about this whole idea is it kind of gives us a picture into Satoshi's mind about what he wanted Bitcoin to be. Uh, he tried to predict the future with what might happen as he spoke about, um, that, uh, he thought bandwidth in the next 4 or 5 years would be trivial. You know, he thought that our technology would advance, uh, faster than it did. And, uh, this is something that, uh, uh, when you're a futurist or when you try to predict the future, sometimes the future works that way. Uh, you know, like I remember when I was a kid, I thought everybody would be zooming around in flying cars by now. So we don't have the flying cars, you know, uh, but we have other things, right? And other ideas. And so Satoshi couldn't see the future, but I just think it's quite interesting that he, uh, thought this way about Bitcoin. And it kind of gives us a picture of what Bitcoin was really meant to be. Unfortunately, Satoshi was unable to see what would happen with ASIC mining as well, and that ASIC mining would become this more decentralized, for lack of a better word, situation where people couldn't mine Bitcoin, and that these large data centers that exist now, he didn't see that on the radar because it was no ASIC mining at that time. So the future went in different directions. It got better in some ways and maybe outside his plan in other ways. But what is seeming to be true from what this content creator is saying, this person here, he's saying that Bitcoin Cash is seemingly more on par with Satoshi's idea about what Bitcoin was supposed to be about.

This limit out of the way is the version of Bitcoin that best reflects what Satoshi Nakamoto actually had in mind. What do you think? Post your thoughts below the video. I'm Chronos. Thanks for watching.

So that's all very interesting, and it gives us something to think about, doesn't it? You know, I think at the end of the day, we have to ask the question, is Bitcoin what we want it to be, or is it definitive and what it should be? You know, it's kind of like What if I went in and I took the Constitution of the United States or your perspective laws of the land, whatever they might be, and just went on, went in and said, okay, let's just change this to say this and we'll go this method with it at this time, right? Then a lot of people in your country would probably have a big problem or issue with that. And when you're looking at the Bitcoin white paper and you're getting away from that, when something like micropayments are impractical, they're too costly, the fees are too high, that this isn't gonna work quite well as a digital payment system or money. Because the reality is a lot of transactions, transactions we need to do and that we will be doing if we were gonna use blockchain technology in this way, would consist of many micro payments. And so you wouldn't be using Bitcoin, you'd be using something else. Now, of course, the story is we hear a lot of people saying, well, you know, now we got Lightning Network or something like that. But when Lightning Network is implemented into Bitcoin, I think it's a fair assumption to make that the Lightning Network kind of pulls away from the core ideas of Bitcoin itself and what Bitcoin was. Uh, now I think at the very end, I think what a lot of us might have an issue with, and I have a slight problem with from this content creator, is he then goes, okay, so this was the problem, so, um, then Bitcoin Cash does it better, so maybe it's Bitcoin Cash. And I do like Bitcoin Cash, but I don't think Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin, right? Uh, there's many reasons why that probably wouldn't work well as being Bitcoin. Um, say several reasons is, uh, I, I personally don't like the idea of, uh, people who have invested in Bitcoin and the concept of Bitcoin, the idea of Bitcoin, uh, and then, um, uh, you, uh, a, a version of Bitcoin pops up, we call them altcoins, and all the money and all the value and network and the money that's went into the original infrastructure of that system, although it may no longer be true to the ideas of that first system. That means the people who have invested in that, their value has— they've lost their value because now they have to go into another coin. Because Bitcoin Cash, although it might be closer to the idea of the original Bitcoin, I can agree with that, over Bitcoin Core, it is still not the original Bitcoin, right? It is a new coin that acts more closer to what the future of the original Bitcoin may have been, or may, may have, could have been, or could have been, right? So there's where is some problems. Now, where I think it would work well, if there was a way you didn't have to lose your value and you could still move that value along blockchains, and that's what we do in our project BitcoinNYK.com, but that's a That's for another day. But it is something to think about, and I'd like to hear you all's thoughts on that. And, you know, and when you respond to this, please, I, you know, I love for you guys to give this question some thought because I know a lot of people don't like Bitcoin Cash and things like that. And, and, and, and the knee-jerk response is Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin, this is not Bitcoin, the original Bitcoin is the original Bitcoin. Why I disagree with that, I don't think the original Bitcoin is the original bit. I don't think this Bitcoin today is the original Bitcoin, because I don't think it really shares the, the main properties of Bitcoin in that way. But I will agree Bitcoin Cash is not that either. But I like, I like you all to, you know, give that question some thought about how far can this get away from Satoshi's idea before something else? And does this content creator here does he make valid points? Because I think he certainly does, but I, I like to hear you guys' thoughts and opinions about it. So I'd like to move on to the next, segment, and on this one we're going to talk about, a, a, a CNBC program that aired, where Jimmy Son talked a little bit about the differences between blockchain and Bitcoin.

Pretty big way.

Do you not see any utility in blockchain for enterprise?

I don't see any use by enterprises. They just sort of see the buzzword and, you know, imagine a world where you can XYZ, and they get sold on that vision without knowing any of the technical underpinnings. And Essentially what they're selling them is a square circle. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. Say you create something that's semi-decentralized using blockchain technology or whatever, I will be able to do that faster, cheaper, easier, more conveniently, be able to iterate more often with a centralized service that does the same thing.

Healthcare is a good example of what he's talking about here. Putting medical records on the blockchain could increase security and patient control, But decentralizing everything is tedious and expensive. It'd be a lot cheaper and easier to just update hospital IT systems.

It's rather unfortunate that, you know, people are so hyped on this technology. What can we do with blockchain? What can we do with blockchain? What can we apply this to?

Oops, meant to pause that there, but as you can see, we were getting into Jimmy Song, who's a programmer, a Bitcoin maximalist, and in a very alarming way. He talks about— and I'm kind of actually surprised a little bit, uh, because he talks about, uh, blockchain having really no use in applications to enterprises at all, and that if you try to use Bitcoin for something other than, uh, money, uh, that, uh, it would, it would be inefficient. So he's saying that the argument for blockchain technology is, is not a very good one, and that the only uses of blockchain technology is in money, in Bitcoin. Now the only problem with this, the only issue is this: if we go back to the prior video, right, if the only use for blockchain technology is using Bitcoin as money, based on how Bitcoin works today with the high transactional fees, if you try to make micropayments and not being efficient in that way, then it would be a— it wouldn't even be a really good money, would it? And so that's what's led many to believe or move over, right, to the idea that Bitcoin works better as a store of value, this commodity, right, this, this gold, if you will. And we're going to talk about some of the problems with that a little bit later, some of the comparisons to gold and in the Bitcoin market. But let's finish up on what Jimmy's saying about the situation with Bitcoin here. And oops. Sorry about that, guys.

How do we solve it? That's the right way to, you know, actually do innovation. You know, what's hurting? How do I solve it? I hate to be that guy, but I'm the one saying Vampr has no clothes, right? Like, it's a technology stack that works for Bitcoin because it was designed that way. For everything else, doesn't make any sense.

All right, so Jimmy is obviously out on blockchain for business, but a lot of companies seem to disagree, like technology giant IBM. I thought it'd be pretty valuable to see what a major enterprise has to say about the prospect, and it turns out IBM has an entire blockchain division.

Okay, I was trying to find that part where Jimmy talks about, um, uh, Bitcoin only being good for money, but you kind of got some of that idea of what he was saying. And I'll leave a link in the description for this entire um, uh, broadcast. But, uh, excuse me, but he says that, uh, uh, Bitcoin is only designed to work as a money, right? Because you clearly heard him say that blockchain technology doesn't work for business or enterprises, right? And if they try to use it, how inefficient it would be. Now, I have to kind of agree, uh, a great deal with Jimmy on this because I, I've had conversations with several developers where we tried to brainstorm uses for blockchain technology. And I can tell you that many times we've come up empty. And so we've also come up with them finally, with many finally just admitting that blockchain doesn't work for many things. They were, they were sound exactly like Jimmy, Jimmy Song, and they weren't Bitcoin maximalists, but they were saying the same thing he was saying. And we've tried several applications with blockchain technology. It, and it didn't, um, it didn't work well. It wasn't efficient. But in saying that, I want to just say two things, and I want to point out two things. The first thing is, then, if Jimmy Song is saying that Bitcoin works better as a money, uh, you know, does he— is he accounting for microtransactions as well? Because we know Bitcoin does not work good in that department. So I'm under the assumption that he would mean more or less like a hard money. Like gold or something like that. So that's the only thing I can think of with that. But I think there will be a lot left to be desired in that again, because what we'll get with that is normal people who would be using Bitcoin would want to do transactions with it on a daily basis. Now, if it's going to be treated something like gold where the average person who's conducting business and moving money Uh, he's not storing his money in gold for the most part. The top asset for him is the, uh, the, the US dollar or the, uh, or the, uh, or the, or the euro, right? That, that's what we trade the most. Uh, and so for most people, that's where a lot of their assets are. Uh, it's not in gold and many of these things like that. So I, I don't really, um And again, you imagine them trying to move their money out of Bitcoin and paying those very high transactional fees. So at the, at the, at the very least, it would be used as a way to protect your money or shelter, not an efficient use of money. And I think this is very important. And going back and focusing on what Satoshi was saying in those early papers, I think it comes across abundantly clear that he was interested in Bitcoin being used for micropayments. And we know that's pretty much out of question the way that the structure of Bitcoin exists today. So I think that's something we need to really think long and hard about before we make a knee-jerk reaction and say something like, oh, this is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is the only, uh, uh, you know, uh, true, uh, thing in cryptocurrency that we need to be involved in. But the reality is if people don't feel that they can use it effectively and efficiently, the growth of Bitcoin, I think, will be hindered a great, a great deal. So now I want to move into the last segment, and that's gonna kind of go into the idea of an article I came across that talks about how Facebook Coin is going to annihilate Ripple. It's gonna annihilate Ripple And, you know, I would, I would, I would be maybe even adding Bitcoin to that, you know, possibly if things keep going the way they're going. But this of course comes from, I think it was the Bank of Siam, one of Ripple's last, one of its last business deals, or banks it was trying to add to the xRapid system that didn't go, that didn't work well. And, and then we have to basically think about what does this mean for the future of something like Ripple XRP, like in the unbanked department. If you, if you look at something like Facebook, if people are using something like the Facebook global coin and and they, uh, came effectively now used, you know, integrated into their, their, their Facebook accounts, move this, uh, cryptocurrency around, wouldn't that technically make them bank now? Uh, would they need, uh, would they need many of these other services that are vying to be, uh, you know, banking services for them? Another thing we have to, you know, keep in mind too is that The average person doesn't think of banking and money in the sense that we think of it, uh, in the cryptocurrency space. So a lot of people, when they come in, they aren't looking at, uh, well, how many nodes are being run, or how centralized is this? Uh, they just can't trust the banking systems that they are— that are in their countries, in the economic structure, and they're probably more interested in having, uh, a use to, uh, access to bank accounts through a network like probably what will exist with Facebook Global Coin, more so than how many nodes are being run in a variety of things like that. So I think the, the, the point is that this can definitely hurt banking, uh, the, uh, uh, these, uh, entities that are going out after the unbanked, um, you know. But with Facebook Coin, it's— I think it's gonna also as a payment system, hinder a lot of the effects of what's going to happen with a lot of these cryptocurrencies and possibly even Bitcoin. Another interesting report I want to close out with is, and I don't have it in front of me, I'll try to leave a link in the description, but it had to do with a lot of the reports that was done by Bitwise that I'm pretty sure was sent off to the SEC. And it talks about the wash trading and the manipulation of the price and the value of Bitcoin. And it talks about it in a way where it shows it— the statistics are quite alarming. Gold, with a peer-to-peer gold, gold which has a market of about $7-8 trillion now, it's about 20 times higher than the value of Bitcoin, I believe, at this point in time. It's, at the same time, it trades only 3— this daily trade volume is only 3 times less than that of gold. So in comparing this, in comparing this Uh, it's kind of weird because, uh, you can see that there's, there's some huge issues in the market cap of Bitcoin and its daily trade volume compared to that of gold. But not, not only just compared to that of gold, uh, compared to, uh, companies like Apple, uh, where the daily volume, daily trade volume of, uh, Bitcoin is almost, uh, uh, over, over half that of Apple's per day. I'll have to look at those stats again. But the relationships between the trading of Apple and the price of gold, when you couple that with the market cap of Bitcoin, it just shows that the prices of Bitcoin are definitely inaccurate. And so, you know, a lot of my past videos, I've already thrown out the the real price of Bitcoin, what I believe to be around $800. Um, but I'm going to try to produce that report and leave a link in the description that Bitwise did and sent out to the SEC. And the way they was able to figure out a lot of wash trading and inaccurate prices of Bitcoin, uh, coming from the exchanges was quite easily. Uh, when they— a lot of the exchanges that got broke down meant that every member of that exchange, in some cases would have to be doing like, uh, trading— trade volume about $20,000 a day each. And so it just starts to hit ridiculous levels, uh, for those numbers to be real, because it would mean that, uh, you know, every account— some of these exchanges didn't have that many members, so you're wondering, well, where's all this trade volume coming from? And so that was one way they were able to kind of close it down. But it's all very interesting, and I think it does make us really have to take a step back and think about, uh, you know, what we should be looking at in cryptocurrency and what's going to have the staying power and, uh, what's going to really last and, and, you know, it'd be something, uh, uh, effective and useful to people. Uh, I invite you all to look at our project BitcoinNYK.com that we think addresses a lot of the problems in cryptocurrency. And we think you definitely need to take a look at it and add that to part of your crypto education on our quest to try to find out exactly, you know, or learn as much as we can about this space so that we're always a step ahead of the uncertain and the unforeseen occurrences that often come our way in cryptocurrency. But that's all I want to say in this video. If you like content like this, don't forget to like, subscribe, And until next time, take care.